We - Daniel van der Velden'We'
Metahaven
We - Daniel van der Velden'We'
Metahaven
Lecture presented by Daniel van der Velden at the Design Blast conference at HfG Karlsruhe, 23 May 2008.
Download Pdf
The work that is passing by in the backdrop is work by Metahaven. Please feel free feel to interrupt, but the images are set to a timing. An image is given an average of about 6,6 seconds. An uninteresting image gets 4 seconds, a more interesting image is given up to 12 seconds.
The designer who wakes up on an early morning in the 21st century knows that his human capital, creativity and labour are the last reserve of the western economies.
Or, to put it differently: you don't get out of bed to go to work. You cannot go to work, because you are your work. And since you already are your work you can be nowhere where there isn't also your work.
At the moment of the 'design blast', the 'big bang' of design in the 21st century, we the designers are becoming the key producers of value of all sorts. Design blast implies that the collateral damage is everywhere at the same time, so that everywhere there is design and the way it operates is uncontrolled and inconsistent.
You are noticing that I'm taking the liberty to re-interprete the title of this conference, Design Blast , a title that, so it seems, has been left deliberately without 'theme', so that simply the energy and emergence of new forms of design practice have become the subject. So what signifies 'we', the generation of the design blast, what makes this generation different from others, with what new problems and challenges are 'we' confronted?
My thesis is that we, the generation of the design blast, who live in the explosion and its aftermath, have to reinvent our 'we'. We are in a situation where there is little or no emphasis on our collectivity as we are all, of course, individuals, and we are competitors, and we can hide this by creating our own niches where it seems we're not competing. What is needed at the moment is not another niche, but the description of a new condition, one with which we can construct a 'we'. If our only common trait is that we're all children of the explosion, that already is a 'we'. A 'we' that is not presupposed in the old terminologies. We all witnessed good old design, or rather, old-fashioned 'good design' falling apart, we saw it being torn to pieces by forces beyond its scope, and the best thing one can do to verify this is to take a pilgrimage to the mountain in Ulm where once its famous Hochschule für Gestaltung was flourishing. On this mountain, a new world of ratio and calmness was designed in full awareness of the dangers of romanticism and politics, which had let to totalitarianism and loss of life. The involuntary slogan of Ulm was 'Never Again', and its stream of household appliances, strategic solutions for family life under social democracy, protest banners set in lower case Helvetica, and other such marvels, pays tribute to a very specific era which we have now left behind. That era was rooted in the idea that you could promote the good, address the bad, and apply for compensation with the state; it was premised on the condition that global issues were distinctly global, and the same for the local and the national; the interplay between and bypassing of these spheres by sovereign agents was still kept at bay by the state and its regulations. What we now see, is that all those formerly distinct realms are getting mixed up and bring forth new forms which are sovereign and running free because they cannot be addressed by the traditional institutions; it is what the architectural theoretician Keller Easterling calls 'extrastatecraft'.
If you want to look at something that looks like Ulm, look at your iPod. It has been designed to look like something simple. But the reality is that it is not simple. Inside of it, and connected to it, and attached to it, there are complex installations of information, copyright laws, aesthetics, whole worlds in fact, which are unchecked by the outer simplicity of the object. Then, it has been manufactured in China by slave labourers. It is the same slave labourers who make our laptops. You have just been signing a petition against oppression in China using the laptop computer you could buy because it was built in China under oppression, and to do that you've used an invention of the American military: the internet.
In a seminal novel, not entirely by coincidence called We, the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, in 1924, described life in an all-encompassing futurist world called the OneState, ruled by an abstract figure called the Benefactor. Citizens are called Numbers – please note that in the Netherlands the individual tax number is now renamed the Citizen Service Number.
All buildings and structures in the OneState are made of glass. The protagonist, called D-503, falls in love with an irresistable woman who is somehow rebellious against the OneState because, for example, she smokes and drinks alcohol. Her name is I-330. What D-503 is doing is against the mechanisms and rules of the OneState with its fixed timetables for everything including making love. After he has made love to I-330, he sees through the appearance of the structures of OneState. He says:
'Somehow this never entered my head before, but this is really how it is: We on this earth are walking the whole time above a boiling crimson sea of fire, hidden down there in the bowels of the earth. But we never think of it. And then suddenly the thin shell beneath our feet seems to turn into glass, and suddenly we see...
I became glass. I saw into myself, inside.
There were two me's. One was the old one, D-503, Number D-503, and the other... The other used to just stick his hairy paws out of his shell, but now all of him came out, the shell burst open, and the pieces were just to fly in all directions... and then what?'
This quote provides a really good parallel to both looking into the iPod, and its inner sea of complexity, and the 'design blast' metaphor. There is a seeing into the crimson sea of fire, and an explosion, which are about the same thing.
Now that we have accepted that our iPods look like they have been designed in Ulm and we've accepted that China makes them and that China politics makes we can afford them, how do we deal with the distributed responsibility, the distributed guilt, how do we cope with the situations where clear choices of yes or no, friend or enemy, seem to have been made impossible? What we should remark here is that design is the thing that enables this condition, facilitates it. Design is not the victim – our activities making things look the way they look are inherent to constructing a system where legitimacy is granted on the thing designed, and therefore what we design becomes legitimate nevertheless te crimson sea of fire beneath it.
In the postmodern 'economies of signs and space' (a term from the sociologists Lash and Urry), the designer has risen as a chimera, a new kind of being, who may be a superstar on the one hand, who loves to compare himself to immensely popular musicians, celebrated restaurant chefs and world famous starchitects, but on the other hand is also a worker, a labourer, someone whose activities produce value some of which the designer owns himself but much of which is owned by others. This value goes far beyond plain use, or function; in fact, the more advanced and succesful and glamorous the designer, the less the value he produces is about such plain realities.
That means that the designer, as an agent in the distributed network, less and less works with his hands to produce objects we can touch, but that his (or her) personality and subjectivity are becoming the real essence of the value. It is very likely that someone who is working as a designer today in an advanced western society, in past times would have been manufacturing cars or household appliances at a factory, or would have been working as a teacher. Or he was a postman delivering the mail. We have killed mail together by sending email. The fact that 'mail' at some point got frozen as a state-governed activity for the public good was good. Now if postmen get fired from their jobs we protest because of neoliberalism; but it is 'we' who started it, it is 'we' who did it by sending out these emails, so 'we' are eventually protesting against the consequences of our own behaviour. As most of us are aware, the factories were moved outward, to countries where labour is cheaper. That manufacturing job had been a very well-protected one, with unions, pensions, and the possibility to strike for better wages and working conditions. The same goes for the postman: one could be a postman for life, and that job would pay for being a novelist, a poet, or an artist in the non-professional after hours which would, in the world of Zamyatin's OneState have been the 'Personal Hour'. Subjectivity was positioned next to work which granted it an inherent sustainability. Right now, subjectivity has to pay the bills. The contemporary designer does not enjoy these long term reassurances and secure boundaries between work and life; the designer who takes the place of the worker must struggle with everything constantly, from the monthly payments of rent and electricity to the balance between free time and work time, to having a family and getting children, in a constant process of self-evaluation. Am I good enough, am I competitive enough, do I not disappoint my family and friends, do I spend enough 'quality time' with my children, have I updated my web site, my blog, my Flickr account, my MySpace and Facebook accounts, have I, in other words, made it clear enough that my whole person and personality, my very existence as a subject, is unconditionally involved in the production of value?
By following the very pathways of free choice, designers now find themselves in the situation that their very lives are at stake; like production tapping into their bloodstream, designers have to exploit their own personality, their own subjectivity, and make these into the sources of added value, effectively doing away with the boundaries between life and work or rather bringing this to the final conclusion: life itself has become part of work. Being exploited has moved into the realm of self-exploitation with no alternative. The contemporary protest movements call this 'precarity', and with the protest against precarious working conditions they are in contradistinction with an earlier generation of protesters who wanted precarity; they wanted to do away with everything, the fixed job, the pension, etcetera: the establishment could have it all back, they wanted to be liberated from these structures. It was better not to have a pension and then be free than to be imprisoned in immovable pyramids now and forever in order to live happily ever after. Nowadays, protesters organize occupations of universities and street demonstrations in order to secure pensions and job contracts, as happened not so long ago in Paris. In other words, the things that formerly concerned the workers in the factory have become the things that now directly concern the life of the elites in the universities.
The new form of labour which has risen out of the ashes of industrial production is immaterial, it is about processing information, intellectual concepts, aesthetic forms, and social and communicative agency. The concept of 'multitasking' has changed from being the exception to an otherwise repetitive chain worker job, to becoming the new standard rule of design labour. Inevitably, this changes the profession 'designer', fundamentally. All we need to say is that multitasking, 'agency', slowly transforms design from a specialism into a generalism. From someone trained to do only a few things really well, like being able to execute a specialized craft, the designer becomes someone who is reasonably good at doing a lot of things simultaneously. That accounts for a loss of comparison; it becomes less and less easy to compare good old craft-based production to today's precarious, all-encompassing 'design blast'. I think that would be a matter of honesty: crossing boundaries implies that you can't go back once you've crossed them to measure things by the old standards. We have to upgrade, so there is a loss of measurement. I think that the Design Blast conference has acknowledged the crossing of the boundaries by inviting people who have crossed them. That is to say that there are now new boundaries, not those old ones which multi-disciplinary multitasking and agency and authorship have overcome, but precisely the limits of these new concepts which have effectively expanded the definition of design labour. There are limits to how much one can multitask and those limits are the new borders. One may say that at the limits of multitasking, something like a set of new coordinates for 'craft', or 'trade', simply Beruf , can be set.
So now we have seen the designer appear as the former worker and we see that all his life is at stake; a labour power which is completely identified with subjectivity. We can sense how the accumulation of knowledge and agency within design begins to visibly conflict with the kind of value it is expected, or presupposed, to embody. The expansion of design into the life and subjectivity and knowledge of its producers, design as immaterial labour, holds the potential for a further emancipation, as we designers may disagree with some of the presuppositions which are held on our behalf. The fact that we now own our own subjectivity and the way we express it does not mean we own the value extracted from that subjectivity by others. Look at MySpace, the social networking site owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox Television.
The expression for this is soft power, or social power, in other words, persuasion and attraction as ways to get things your way, which is translated as legitimacy which is not much else than the amounts of positive connections one has. In a network, there currently is no other way to define legitimacy than by the criterium of connectedness, so that we see that legitimacy is always 'granted' by others and cannot be claimed. Another way to say this is that legitimacy means having friends; and many, if possible.
Inherently, the potential for politics is transformed in two major ways. One is that what was formerly called a 'counter strategy' or an 'emanicipatory struggle', or just more plain and common a sort of 'revolution', instead of overturning what it is against, becomes immediately a new productive niche inside the existing system. And secondly in a network it is impossible to distinguish and address a singular, central figure in power, as power is distributed in a structure seemingly without clear top-down hierarchies. In other words, 'we' seem to take part already in all that we are against, so that our moral judgment, like the one we verdict over China, itself has to disconnect from our actions. We literally sign a petition against oppression using the keyboard of the laptop that was built thanks to the oppression. It is 'we' who did it ourselves as we eagerly distributed our loyalties, our debt, our guilt, over the networks that we were offered, plainly also because it felt good and there seemed no reason why not to. And at this moment we need to start to map or draw the world that this has resulted in and see how what we do sits in there.
And this is why the design blast generation would need to reinvent its 'we'; there is no other way. We need to look beyond the particularities of each individual practice and define what makes the 'we'.
Design philosophies for which form and content result from each other cannot cope with the design blast. The concepts of the inside and outside of design objects are increasingly disconnected. These processes are the indicators of forces beyond locality and specificity:
'Every designed artefact bears witness to the large scale incoherence of its productive conditions. It is clear that design is not just political, but primarily geopolitical; the new shapes and forms may arise haphazardly and by chance, but they register (in a quite formidable way) the geopolitical forces of the globalizing world.
Coherence in design today exists primarily in the recognition of large-scale incoherence.'
And this is what I think makes the 'we' today, that we are facing this incoherence not as something that can be overcome and the old situation restored, but that we're facing it as a new condition.
So what I argue for when I say that the design blast generation has to re-invent its 'we', is one: the subjectivity of design needs to be politicized, and two: the political subjectivity of design labour needs to be collectivized.
Now what do I mean with that? I can imagine that some of you might think: there's another one of those madmen from '68, one of those soixante-huitards; well I'm not, I was born after 1968 in a middle class family of psychiatrists/artists and teachers. Indeed, my parents had permanent job contracts with fixed employers, which is now one of the reasons why I think they could have me as a child.
Given the particular situation of design labour nowadays, to politicize design is not just to make posters against poverty or for human rights; it means to politicize not the 'objective' but rather the 'subjective' aspect of design. And what does it mean to politicize? That would mean to redefine concepts such as refusal, criticism, counterargument, propaganda, strike, image, manifesto, etc. in the face of power being distributed rather than fixed in a single location, where the default value of every connection is presupposed to be the agreement.
And it would mean to see the new, 'acquired' competences and activities of design multitasking, the condition of 'you are your work', as the new core rather than an exception to a stable craft. If in principle all knowledge is welcome to transform into added value, then how about the knowledge which addresses knowledge, added value and subjectivity itself? Potentially, this process runs in opposite to some of the presupposed forms of value that the contemporary designer is requested to contribute to. The clash happens when the knowledge and ideas accumulated begin to form new clusters which exceed the set of operative limitations assigned to designers and their prescribed socio-economical roles, when such new positions imply knowledge and thus power over subjectivity itself.
As the principal digital tools of design have been equally spread among professional practitioners and 'amateurs'/users alike, professional distinction is an unlikely perspective for a future 'we'. With that I mean that the common 'we' of designers also has to include the users. User-generated content, in all its manifestations, implies a fundamental transformation of the labour force of which designers are simply part and parcel; they are not 'above it' and not even 'next to it'. The core of design professionals will not be able to reclaim the central role it once possessed based on the mastery of tools and services unavailable to users. It seems more probable that among professional designers, the gap will increase between celebrities and labourers. Such a gap has already appeared in architecture. Subsequently, a new 'we' created between designers and users may be a potentially more succesful way forward.
In the OneState, the united political formation in Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, D-503 and his secret love, I-330, are standing outside and unlike on other days in this productive, techocratic paradise, it is foggy. There is not the typical brightness and clarity but just what the writer calls a 'delirious milky solution'. She asks:
'You like the fog?'
She'd switched to the familiar form of 'you' – an ancient, forgotten form... the 'you' a master used to his slave. It was slowly sinking into me, but sharp: Yes, I am a slave, and that is also how it has to be, also good.
'Yes, good,' I said aloud to myself. And then to her: 'I hate the fog. I'm afraid of the fog'.
Then I-330 says:
'That means you love it. You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.'
References
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We , London: Penguin, 1993, translated by Clarence Brown
Metahaven, White Night Before A Manifesto , Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2008
Metahaven
Lecture presented by Daniel van der Velden at the Design Blast conference at HfG Karlsruhe, 23 May 2008.
Download PdfThe work that is passing by in the backdrop is work by Metahaven. Please feel free feel to interrupt, but the images are set to a timing. An image is given an average of about 6,6 seconds. An uninteresting image gets 4 seconds, a more interesting image is given up to 12 seconds.
The designer who wakes up on an early morning in the 21st century knows that his human capital, creativity and labour are the last reserve of the western economies.
Or, to put it differently: you don't get out of bed to go to work. You cannot go to work, because you are your work. And since you already are your work you can be nowhere where there isn't also your work.
At the moment of the 'design blast', the 'big bang' of design in the 21st century, we the designers are becoming the key producers of value of all sorts. Design blast implies that the collateral damage is everywhere at the same time, so that everywhere there is design and the way it operates is uncontrolled and inconsistent.
You are noticing that I'm taking the liberty to re-interprete the title of this conference, Design Blast , a title that, so it seems, has been left deliberately without 'theme', so that simply the energy and emergence of new forms of design practice have become the subject. So what signifies 'we', the generation of the design blast, what makes this generation different from others, with what new problems and challenges are 'we' confronted?
My thesis is that we, the generation of the design blast, who live in the explosion and its aftermath, have to reinvent our 'we'. We are in a situation where there is little or no emphasis on our collectivity as we are all, of course, individuals, and we are competitors, and we can hide this by creating our own niches where it seems we're not competing. What is needed at the moment is not another niche, but the description of a new condition, one with which we can construct a 'we'. If our only common trait is that we're all children of the explosion, that already is a 'we'. A 'we' that is not presupposed in the old terminologies. We all witnessed good old design, or rather, old-fashioned 'good design' falling apart, we saw it being torn to pieces by forces beyond its scope, and the best thing one can do to verify this is to take a pilgrimage to the mountain in Ulm where once its famous Hochschule für Gestaltung was flourishing. On this mountain, a new world of ratio and calmness was designed in full awareness of the dangers of romanticism and politics, which had let to totalitarianism and loss of life. The involuntary slogan of Ulm was 'Never Again', and its stream of household appliances, strategic solutions for family life under social democracy, protest banners set in lower case Helvetica, and other such marvels, pays tribute to a very specific era which we have now left behind. That era was rooted in the idea that you could promote the good, address the bad, and apply for compensation with the state; it was premised on the condition that global issues were distinctly global, and the same for the local and the national; the interplay between and bypassing of these spheres by sovereign agents was still kept at bay by the state and its regulations. What we now see, is that all those formerly distinct realms are getting mixed up and bring forth new forms which are sovereign and running free because they cannot be addressed by the traditional institutions; it is what the architectural theoretician Keller Easterling calls 'extrastatecraft'.
If you want to look at something that looks like Ulm, look at your iPod. It has been designed to look like something simple. But the reality is that it is not simple. Inside of it, and connected to it, and attached to it, there are complex installations of information, copyright laws, aesthetics, whole worlds in fact, which are unchecked by the outer simplicity of the object. Then, it has been manufactured in China by slave labourers. It is the same slave labourers who make our laptops. You have just been signing a petition against oppression in China using the laptop computer you could buy because it was built in China under oppression, and to do that you've used an invention of the American military: the internet.
In a seminal novel, not entirely by coincidence called We, the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, in 1924, described life in an all-encompassing futurist world called the OneState, ruled by an abstract figure called the Benefactor. Citizens are called Numbers – please note that in the Netherlands the individual tax number is now renamed the Citizen Service Number.
All buildings and structures in the OneState are made of glass. The protagonist, called D-503, falls in love with an irresistable woman who is somehow rebellious against the OneState because, for example, she smokes and drinks alcohol. Her name is I-330. What D-503 is doing is against the mechanisms and rules of the OneState with its fixed timetables for everything including making love. After he has made love to I-330, he sees through the appearance of the structures of OneState. He says:
'Somehow this never entered my head before, but this is really how it is: We on this earth are walking the whole time above a boiling crimson sea of fire, hidden down there in the bowels of the earth. But we never think of it. And then suddenly the thin shell beneath our feet seems to turn into glass, and suddenly we see...
I became glass. I saw into myself, inside.
There were two me's. One was the old one, D-503, Number D-503, and the other... The other used to just stick his hairy paws out of his shell, but now all of him came out, the shell burst open, and the pieces were just to fly in all directions... and then what?'
This quote provides a really good parallel to both looking into the iPod, and its inner sea of complexity, and the 'design blast' metaphor. There is a seeing into the crimson sea of fire, and an explosion, which are about the same thing.
Now that we have accepted that our iPods look like they have been designed in Ulm and we've accepted that China makes them and that China politics makes we can afford them, how do we deal with the distributed responsibility, the distributed guilt, how do we cope with the situations where clear choices of yes or no, friend or enemy, seem to have been made impossible? What we should remark here is that design is the thing that enables this condition, facilitates it. Design is not the victim – our activities making things look the way they look are inherent to constructing a system where legitimacy is granted on the thing designed, and therefore what we design becomes legitimate nevertheless te crimson sea of fire beneath it.
In the postmodern 'economies of signs and space' (a term from the sociologists Lash and Urry), the designer has risen as a chimera, a new kind of being, who may be a superstar on the one hand, who loves to compare himself to immensely popular musicians, celebrated restaurant chefs and world famous starchitects, but on the other hand is also a worker, a labourer, someone whose activities produce value some of which the designer owns himself but much of which is owned by others. This value goes far beyond plain use, or function; in fact, the more advanced and succesful and glamorous the designer, the less the value he produces is about such plain realities.
That means that the designer, as an agent in the distributed network, less and less works with his hands to produce objects we can touch, but that his (or her) personality and subjectivity are becoming the real essence of the value. It is very likely that someone who is working as a designer today in an advanced western society, in past times would have been manufacturing cars or household appliances at a factory, or would have been working as a teacher. Or he was a postman delivering the mail. We have killed mail together by sending email. The fact that 'mail' at some point got frozen as a state-governed activity for the public good was good. Now if postmen get fired from their jobs we protest because of neoliberalism; but it is 'we' who started it, it is 'we' who did it by sending out these emails, so 'we' are eventually protesting against the consequences of our own behaviour. As most of us are aware, the factories were moved outward, to countries where labour is cheaper. That manufacturing job had been a very well-protected one, with unions, pensions, and the possibility to strike for better wages and working conditions. The same goes for the postman: one could be a postman for life, and that job would pay for being a novelist, a poet, or an artist in the non-professional after hours which would, in the world of Zamyatin's OneState have been the 'Personal Hour'. Subjectivity was positioned next to work which granted it an inherent sustainability. Right now, subjectivity has to pay the bills. The contemporary designer does not enjoy these long term reassurances and secure boundaries between work and life; the designer who takes the place of the worker must struggle with everything constantly, from the monthly payments of rent and electricity to the balance between free time and work time, to having a family and getting children, in a constant process of self-evaluation. Am I good enough, am I competitive enough, do I not disappoint my family and friends, do I spend enough 'quality time' with my children, have I updated my web site, my blog, my Flickr account, my MySpace and Facebook accounts, have I, in other words, made it clear enough that my whole person and personality, my very existence as a subject, is unconditionally involved in the production of value?
By following the very pathways of free choice, designers now find themselves in the situation that their very lives are at stake; like production tapping into their bloodstream, designers have to exploit their own personality, their own subjectivity, and make these into the sources of added value, effectively doing away with the boundaries between life and work or rather bringing this to the final conclusion: life itself has become part of work. Being exploited has moved into the realm of self-exploitation with no alternative. The contemporary protest movements call this 'precarity', and with the protest against precarious working conditions they are in contradistinction with an earlier generation of protesters who wanted precarity; they wanted to do away with everything, the fixed job, the pension, etcetera: the establishment could have it all back, they wanted to be liberated from these structures. It was better not to have a pension and then be free than to be imprisoned in immovable pyramids now and forever in order to live happily ever after. Nowadays, protesters organize occupations of universities and street demonstrations in order to secure pensions and job contracts, as happened not so long ago in Paris. In other words, the things that formerly concerned the workers in the factory have become the things that now directly concern the life of the elites in the universities.
The new form of labour which has risen out of the ashes of industrial production is immaterial, it is about processing information, intellectual concepts, aesthetic forms, and social and communicative agency. The concept of 'multitasking' has changed from being the exception to an otherwise repetitive chain worker job, to becoming the new standard rule of design labour. Inevitably, this changes the profession 'designer', fundamentally. All we need to say is that multitasking, 'agency', slowly transforms design from a specialism into a generalism. From someone trained to do only a few things really well, like being able to execute a specialized craft, the designer becomes someone who is reasonably good at doing a lot of things simultaneously. That accounts for a loss of comparison; it becomes less and less easy to compare good old craft-based production to today's precarious, all-encompassing 'design blast'. I think that would be a matter of honesty: crossing boundaries implies that you can't go back once you've crossed them to measure things by the old standards. We have to upgrade, so there is a loss of measurement. I think that the Design Blast conference has acknowledged the crossing of the boundaries by inviting people who have crossed them. That is to say that there are now new boundaries, not those old ones which multi-disciplinary multitasking and agency and authorship have overcome, but precisely the limits of these new concepts which have effectively expanded the definition of design labour. There are limits to how much one can multitask and those limits are the new borders. One may say that at the limits of multitasking, something like a set of new coordinates for 'craft', or 'trade', simply Beruf , can be set.
So now we have seen the designer appear as the former worker and we see that all his life is at stake; a labour power which is completely identified with subjectivity. We can sense how the accumulation of knowledge and agency within design begins to visibly conflict with the kind of value it is expected, or presupposed, to embody. The expansion of design into the life and subjectivity and knowledge of its producers, design as immaterial labour, holds the potential for a further emancipation, as we designers may disagree with some of the presuppositions which are held on our behalf. The fact that we now own our own subjectivity and the way we express it does not mean we own the value extracted from that subjectivity by others. Look at MySpace, the social networking site owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox Television.
The expression for this is soft power, or social power, in other words, persuasion and attraction as ways to get things your way, which is translated as legitimacy which is not much else than the amounts of positive connections one has. In a network, there currently is no other way to define legitimacy than by the criterium of connectedness, so that we see that legitimacy is always 'granted' by others and cannot be claimed. Another way to say this is that legitimacy means having friends; and many, if possible.
Inherently, the potential for politics is transformed in two major ways. One is that what was formerly called a 'counter strategy' or an 'emanicipatory struggle', or just more plain and common a sort of 'revolution', instead of overturning what it is against, becomes immediately a new productive niche inside the existing system. And secondly in a network it is impossible to distinguish and address a singular, central figure in power, as power is distributed in a structure seemingly without clear top-down hierarchies. In other words, 'we' seem to take part already in all that we are against, so that our moral judgment, like the one we verdict over China, itself has to disconnect from our actions. We literally sign a petition against oppression using the keyboard of the laptop that was built thanks to the oppression. It is 'we' who did it ourselves as we eagerly distributed our loyalties, our debt, our guilt, over the networks that we were offered, plainly also because it felt good and there seemed no reason why not to. And at this moment we need to start to map or draw the world that this has resulted in and see how what we do sits in there.
And this is why the design blast generation would need to reinvent its 'we'; there is no other way. We need to look beyond the particularities of each individual practice and define what makes the 'we'.
Design philosophies for which form and content result from each other cannot cope with the design blast. The concepts of the inside and outside of design objects are increasingly disconnected. These processes are the indicators of forces beyond locality and specificity:
'Every designed artefact bears witness to the large scale incoherence of its productive conditions. It is clear that design is not just political, but primarily geopolitical; the new shapes and forms may arise haphazardly and by chance, but they register (in a quite formidable way) the geopolitical forces of the globalizing world.
Coherence in design today exists primarily in the recognition of large-scale incoherence.'
And this is what I think makes the 'we' today, that we are facing this incoherence not as something that can be overcome and the old situation restored, but that we're facing it as a new condition.
So what I argue for when I say that the design blast generation has to re-invent its 'we', is one: the subjectivity of design needs to be politicized, and two: the political subjectivity of design labour needs to be collectivized.
Now what do I mean with that? I can imagine that some of you might think: there's another one of those madmen from '68, one of those soixante-huitards; well I'm not, I was born after 1968 in a middle class family of psychiatrists/artists and teachers. Indeed, my parents had permanent job contracts with fixed employers, which is now one of the reasons why I think they could have me as a child.
Given the particular situation of design labour nowadays, to politicize design is not just to make posters against poverty or for human rights; it means to politicize not the 'objective' but rather the 'subjective' aspect of design. And what does it mean to politicize? That would mean to redefine concepts such as refusal, criticism, counterargument, propaganda, strike, image, manifesto, etc. in the face of power being distributed rather than fixed in a single location, where the default value of every connection is presupposed to be the agreement.
And it would mean to see the new, 'acquired' competences and activities of design multitasking, the condition of 'you are your work', as the new core rather than an exception to a stable craft. If in principle all knowledge is welcome to transform into added value, then how about the knowledge which addresses knowledge, added value and subjectivity itself? Potentially, this process runs in opposite to some of the presupposed forms of value that the contemporary designer is requested to contribute to. The clash happens when the knowledge and ideas accumulated begin to form new clusters which exceed the set of operative limitations assigned to designers and their prescribed socio-economical roles, when such new positions imply knowledge and thus power over subjectivity itself.
As the principal digital tools of design have been equally spread among professional practitioners and 'amateurs'/users alike, professional distinction is an unlikely perspective for a future 'we'. With that I mean that the common 'we' of designers also has to include the users. User-generated content, in all its manifestations, implies a fundamental transformation of the labour force of which designers are simply part and parcel; they are not 'above it' and not even 'next to it'. The core of design professionals will not be able to reclaim the central role it once possessed based on the mastery of tools and services unavailable to users. It seems more probable that among professional designers, the gap will increase between celebrities and labourers. Such a gap has already appeared in architecture. Subsequently, a new 'we' created between designers and users may be a potentially more succesful way forward.
In the OneState, the united political formation in Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, D-503 and his secret love, I-330, are standing outside and unlike on other days in this productive, techocratic paradise, it is foggy. There is not the typical brightness and clarity but just what the writer calls a 'delirious milky solution'. She asks:
'You like the fog?'
She'd switched to the familiar form of 'you' – an ancient, forgotten form... the 'you' a master used to his slave. It was slowly sinking into me, but sharp: Yes, I am a slave, and that is also how it has to be, also good.
'Yes, good,' I said aloud to myself. And then to her: 'I hate the fog. I'm afraid of the fog'.
Then I-330 says:
'That means you love it. You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.'
References
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We , London: Penguin, 1993, translated by Clarence Brown
Metahaven, White Night Before A Manifesto , Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2008
